The Mr. T Experience

In 1986, when the Mr. T Experience released their first record, their blend of punk rock and pop was a complete anomaly. In the mid-eighties, no one could imagine a punk group covering a song by the Monkees. The dominant aesthetic of hardcore and metal crossover didn’t allow a band to be witty and irreverent or melodic and tuneful. But MTX’s pop-punk had a past and a future. Their sound was the offspring of the simple tune-heavy punk rock of the Ramones, who styled themselves as a rougher update of 60’s pop and 50’s greaser doo-wop during the mid-70’s, creating a potent blueprint for the developing punk scene. MTX also took their love for British indie guitar pop bands like the Swell Maps and Television Personalities and gave American Ramones punk a quirky, understated wit usually found on the other side of the pond. After 1986, pop-punk grew from an exception to the rule of the punk scene. Groups like MTX, and subsequent successes Green Day, Screeching Weasel, NoFX and now Blink 182 and Lit continue to expand the popularity of the genre. Pop-punk is understood from the studios of MTV, any skatepark, teenage bedrooms, to tiny punk clubs the world over. After making numerous seminal pop-punk albums, the Mr. T Experience eventually took a right turn and headed out again from under the branches of the pop-punk tree they helped cultivate. 10 years after their first album, they found themselves once again moving in a new direction musically and stylistically. With their most recent albums, MTX has become an anomaly again: considered a pop-punk band but playing music that is different and expanded. In 1986, as they inadvertently helped create the pop-punk sound, the Mr T. Experience was just making music. And that’s what they’ve continued to do, oblivious for the most part to what it might be called. History, as unfair as she can be, will undoubtedly prove MTX one of punk—and pop’s—brightest shining lights.